Symphony Pro Musica

Mark Churchill
Music Director and Conductor

Dances of Distinction

Saturday, April 27, 7:30 p.m.	Hale Middle School, Stow
Sunday, April 28, 7:30 p.m.	Gibbons Middle School, Westborough

SAINT-SAENS	Dance Macabre
HARBISON	Remembering Gatsby, foxtrot for orchestra
BORODIN	Polovetsian Dances
KODALY	Dances of Galanta
RAVEL	La Valse

Camille Saint-Saëns (1835-1921)

Dance Macabre, Op. 40

Symphonic Poem after Henri Cazalis

Saint-Saëns was born in Paris during a time when, despite almost constant political turmoil, the voice of French National music was finding its own voice, under the leadership of Berlioz. Saint-Saëns took his own first steps towards becoming a part of this French musical school by enrolling in the Conservatoire at age 14. His prodigious talents in composition and, especially, keyboard performance gave rise to comparisons with Mozart. In due course, he himself became the leading French composer, not so much, like his predecessor and successors (Debussy, Ravel) through innovation, but more by solidifying the national style in the face of German competition. Saint-Saëns’ music is melodic, moving, and readily accessible to new audiences. Some of his music, especially the Carnival of the Animals, combines the best of fun and lyricism. In retrospect, if we seek a comparison with a Germanic composer, Saint-Saëns’ conservative style is more akin to that of his great contemporary Brahms rather than the genius of Mozart.

The Danse Macabre was written for one of the concerts of French music put on by the Société Nationale, which Saint-Saëns had himself founded. It is based on a poem by Henry Cazalis, which describes Death playing an out-of-tune fiddle for skeletons (xylophone) dancing among the tombstones at midnight.

John Harbison (b. 1938)

Remembering Gatsby (1985)

Foxtrot for Orchestra

Born in Orange, New Jersey, but growing up in Princeton and now based in Boston, John Harbison is a world-class composer with a long and distinguished career writing in a wide range of forms from solo voice, through chamber and orchestral music to full-scale operas. Recently, he has enjoyed great acclaim with his opera The Great Gatsby, which was commissioned by the New York Metropolitan Opera in 1995 and first performed in 1999. Based of course on F. Scott Fitzgerald’s great novel, Harbison wrote both the music and the libretto for the opera, which was so well received, that it is being revived in four performances at the Met starting this coming week. Judging by their titles, you might guess that Remembering Gatsby is an excerpt from the opera but it predates the opera by ten years and is the seed from which the opera grew.

Harbison studied with several composers, particularly Roger Sessions while still in his teens and Walter Piston as an undergraduate at Harvard. Harbison’s earliest significant influences were jazz, Bach and Stravinsky. Indeed, at age 11 he was the pianist of his own jazz band. It is no surprise then that many of his works are suffused with jazz accents including this very enjoyable “Foxtrot for Orchestra”. Since 1969 he has been professor of music at MIT and has been deeply involved in the Boston musical scene, especially with Emmanuel Music. In 1987 Harbison received the Pulitzer Prize in music for his cantata The Flight into Egypt.

Remembering Gatsby is on one level a light hearted piece full of the fun aspects of the “Jazz Age”, evidenced by soprano sax, muted trumpets, and so on. But, like the novel that inspired it, it has a deeper sense of unfulfilled possibilities depicted by the brief introduction, the increasingly frayed portrayal of the foxtrot theme, and the wistful ending.

Alexander Borodin (1833-1887)

Polovetsian Dances

Prince Igor: 8, 17

Borodin was born in St. Petersburg, officially the son of a serf whose name he therefore took. In truth, however, Alexander’s parents were the local Prince and his mistress. Fortunately, he was brought up quite conventionally in his parents’ home and thus he was able to enjoy many of the privileges and benefits accorded to a Prince’s son. His two great interests in life, both of which developed during his teens, were Chemistry and Music. Despite his later celebrity as a composer, it was actually his scientific career that was his “day job”. Indeed, by 1864 he had the Chair of Chemistry at the Medical-Surgical Academy of St. Petersburg.

In 1862 he met Balakirev and became re-acquainted with Musorgsky, with whom he had served some years earlier in the army. Along with Rimsky-Korsakov and Cui, this circle of Russo-centric composers came to be dubbed “The Mighty Handful” (also known as “The Five”). Borodin’s interest in composition and indeed all music had not seriously diminished on account of his academic research, but he had had very little time for serious writing. However, Balakirev rekindled that compositional flame and gave Borodin sufficient help and encouragement to tackle a symphony.

The success of the symphony encouraged him to start work on not one but two operas. The second of these, Prince Igor, was begun in 1869, then laid aside, and taken up again in 1874 with new additions during the next two years. By the year 1882, his academic duties, and his responsibilities to his increasingly ailing wife, took up so much time that he was unable to complete any new major musical works. Although he continued to tinker with Prince Igor, it remained unfinished by the time he suddenly collapsed of heart failure at a ball in 1887. The opera was completed for a production in 1890 by Rimsky-Korsakov and Glazounov, the former having previously prepared the two popular Polovetsian Dances for concert performance during Borodin’s lifetime. The story of the opera is set in the 12^th century where Prince Igor, a southern Russian prince is captured in battle by the Khan of the Tartar tribe known as the Polovetski [for no obvious reason, there are several other variants of the English spelling]. The main melody of the first dance, by which the Polovetsian maidens sing for the Khan’s daughter, was borrowed by the musical Kismet and is familiar as “Stranger in Paradise”. The second part is music for the Polovetsian slaves to entertain the imprisoned Prince.

Zoltán Kodály (1882-1967)

Dances of Galánta

Kodály grew up in the Galanta area of what is now southwestern Slovakia but at the time was part of Hungary. His family was, typically for the area, very musical and while young Zoltán attended high school, he learned piano, violin, viola and cello while also composing music and singing in the church choir! In 1900, he enrolled at Budapest University taking languages and at the same time began extra-curricular studies at the Academy of Music. It was here he began his lifelong collaboration and friendship with his contemporary Béla Bartók. Like their counterparts in England, led by Vaughan Williams, they were determined to capture and pass on the folk music of the Hungarian people. Their first joint project was the publication of Hungarian Folksongs in 1906.

After six months of travel to Berlin and Paris, Kodály was appointed to a professorship at the Academy in Budapest and the following year, with Bartók, founded the New Hungarian Music Society, which specialized in the performance of contemporary works. By 1919, Kodály was appointed deputy director of the Academy under Dohnányi. Unfortunately, politics intervened and his career, already curtailed by the war, was seriously impacted. His most important contributions were in the area of ethnomusicology and as a teacher and a writer of choral music. Still, his purely orchestral music is also extremely good, and these brilliant Galánta Dances from 1933 are excellent examples. They are not original, or even collected by the composer, but are based on a published set of five Gypsy dances from his home region, and are skillfully orchestrated and arranged without break in a style which is at once both recognizably Hungarian and also distinctly personal to Kodály himself.

Maurice Ravel (1875-1937)

La Valse (1919-20)

Poème chorégraphique

One of SPM’s favorite (and most challenging) composers, Ravel was one of the most innovative and brilliant composers of his generation. In particular, his mastery of orchestral scoring is almost without peer. He was born in the Basque village of Ciboure in the foothills of the Pyrenees, to a Swiss father and Basque mother, but the family moved almost immediately to Paris. Nevertheless, he retained a strong affinity for Basque, and by extension, Spanish culture. Although he spent years either at or close to the Paris Conservatoire, he did not excel there and failed to win the coveted Prix de Rome no less than five times. These failures were not due to lack of talent or industry, but more to a rebellious nature and a style of composition that was too far advanced for the establishment.

As well as the sounds of Spain, Ravel was fascinated too by the waltz and was all too eager to fulfill the commission given him by Diaghilev, impresario of Paris’ “Russian Ballet”, with a “choreographic poem” based on the Viennese waltz. The result was described by the composer as “a kind of apotheosis of the Viennese waltz, linked, in my mind, with the impression of a fantastic whirl of destiny”. Ravel introduced the score with the following note: “Whirling clouds give glimpses, through rifts, of couples dancing. The clouds scatter little by little. One sees an immense hall peopled by a twirling crowd. The scene is gradually illuminated. The light of the chandeliers bursts forth, fortissimo. An imperial court in or about 1855.”

The music is in the form of a triptych, with the opening styled “The Birth of the Waltz” which hinting at a waltz rhythm with tantalizingly short snatches. The central section, “The Waltz”, passes the melody to the violins playing on the G string, followed by oboe and clarinets. In the finale, “Apotheosis of the Waltz”, the melody returns but more strident and with greater dissonance. The intensity increases until a set of five discords brings the music to an abrupt but logical end.

Unfortunately, Diaghilev disliked it, causing a falling out which was never healed. Some consolation came with a concert performance in late 1920. But it was not until 1929 that the work was performed, as it had been conceived, by Ida Rubinstein and the Paris Opera.

Internet Resources

John Harbison (Schirmer)
John Harbison (Schirmer)
The Great Gatsby (Schirmer)
The Great Gatsby: Synopsis (Metropolitan opera)

Honouring Maurice Ravel:Home
Maurice Ravel (1875-1937) Catalogue des oeuvres (in French)
Maurice Ravel

Recordings

Bibliography

Groves Dictionary of Music and Musicians
Kobbe's Opera Book

updated 08-Feb-2002